High volume envelope machines capable of accepting stacks of cut sheets of paper or other suitable envelope stock and performing cutting, gluing, and folding operations to produce hundreds of folded envelopes per minute are commercially available from various vendors, for example Winkler+Dünnebier AG. Typically, a human operator of the envelope machine will manually load stacks of envelope paper stock in the machine's feed mechanism and a human operator will manually remove the folded envelopes for packaging or other processing as they completed and made available by the machine.
High volume envelope machines are well suited for the production of long runs of thousands of identical envelopes, but these machines have not been considered practical or efficient for short envelope print jobs, for example a print job of 100 envelopes. It can be appreciated that if a machine were to be running at a rate that produces hundreds of envelopes each minute with every hundred envelopes produced being a different job printed with different information for a different customer, the operator could find it stressful, or impossible, to keep up with that production pace while still correctly locating and removing the set of folded envelopes associated with each individual envelope job for packaging or other processing.
Therefore, there is a need for an envelope production and processing method that is capable of assisting an envelope machine operator in quickly and efficiently identifying the beginning and end of each different envelope order such that the operator can reliably and quickly manually separate each envelope order for further processing.